Earlier this month, Lina Khan, chair of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), wrote an essay in The New York Times affirming the company’s dedication to regulating AI. But there was one AI software Khan didn’t point out that the FTC urgently wants to manage: automated hiring techniques. These vary in complexity from instruments that merely parse resumes and rank them to techniques that green-light candidates and trash candidates deemed unfit. Increasingly, working Americans are obligated to make use of them in the event that they need to get employed.

In my current ebook, The Quantified Worker, I argue that the American employee is being lowered to numbers by AI applied sciences within the office, automated hiring techniques chief amongst them. These techniques cut back candidates to a rating or rank, typically ignoring the gestalt of their human expertise. Sometimes they even type individuals by their race, age, and intercourse, a follow that’s legally prohibited from being a part of the employment decisionmaking course of.

Ironically, many of those techniques are marketed as being bias-free or assured to cut back the chance of discriminatory hiring. But as a result of they’re so loosely regulated, such techniques      have been proven to deny equal employment opportunity on the idea of protected classes akin to race, age, intercourse, and incapacity. In December 2022, for instance, a female truckers union sued Meta, alleging that Facebook “selectively shows job advertisements based on users’ gender and age, with older workers far less likely to see ads and women far less likely to see ads for blue-collar positions, especially in industries that historically exclude women.” This is misleading. Even extra, it’s unfair to job candidates and employers alike. Employers buy automated hiring techniques to cut back their legal responsibility for employment discrimination, and the distributors of these techniques are legally obligated to substantiate their claims of efficacy and equity.

The legislation places automated hiring techniques beneath the FTC’s purview, however the company has but to launch particular pointers on how purveyors of those techniques must promote their wares. It ought to begin by requiring auditing to make sure that automated hiring platforms are fulfilling the guarantees they make to employers. The distributors of those platforms must be obligated to supply clear information of audits demonstrating that their techniques cut back bias in employment decisionmaking as marketed. These audits ought to have the ability to present that the designers adopted Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) pointers when creating the platforms.

Also, in collaboration with the EEOC, the FTC might set up the Fair Automated Hiring Mark, which might be used to certify that automated hiring techniques have handed the rigorous auditing course of. As an imprimatur, the mark can be a helpful sign of high quality to customers—each candidates and employers.

The FTC must also permit job candidates, who’re customers of AI-enabled on-line software techniques, to sue beneath the Federal Credit Report Act (FCRA). Previously, the FCRA was thought to solely apply to the Big Three credit score companies, however a detailed studying exhibits that this legislation can apply every time a report has been created for any “economic decision.” By this definition, applicant profiles created by on-line automated hiring platforms are “consumer reports,” which signifies that the entities that generated them (akin to on-line hiring platforms) can be thought of credit score reporting companies. Under the FCRA, anybody that’s the topic of one in all these experiences can petition the company that made it to see the outcomes and demand corrections or amendments. Most customers have no idea they’ve these rights. The FTC ought to launch an schooling marketing campaign to tell candidates about these rights to allow them to make use of them.